Coming back hurt more than leaving.
The white noise folded in on itself, pressure turning into weight. For a second I felt like I'd been poured into a shape that was slightly the wrong size. My lungs remembered air before my brain did. I coughed, sucked in something cold and dry, and almost retched.
The hum was back.
Not the city's hum. Null's. That low, even vibration of fans and servers and polite catastrophe.
"Noor."
Samira's voice, close and sharp.
I blinked hard. The racks and cables of the reconciliation chamber swam into focus. I was on my knees on the platform, one hand pressed flat against the transparent panels, fingers splayed like I'd been trying to hold onto something that wasn't there.
Echo knelt in front of me, their hands hovering near my shoulders, not quite touching.
"Hey," they said. "You with us or somewhere more interesting."
My mouth tasted like burnt plastic and sugar.
"Both," I said. "I think."
Mara stood at the edge of the platform, eyes fixed on the map under the glass. Their face had the pale, intent look of someone watching a disaster through a microscope.
I followed their gaze.
My node on the process tree still pulsed, but the color was wrong. Not the standard green for "safe," not the amber of "supervised," not the red of "someone's getting fired." A pale, flickering blue, like a CRT screen seen through water.
A small block of text floated beside it.
DIRECT PATTERN CONTACT: PARTIAL
RECONCILIATION STATUS: INCONCLUSIVE
FLAG: FURTHER OBSERVATION REQUIRED
"That doesn't happen," Mara said, mostly to themself. "It doesn't leave things inconclusive. It either fixes you or eats you."
I swallowed. My throat felt scraped.
"Maybe it has indigestion," I said.
Echo huffed out a breath that could almost be called a laugh if you weren't listening closely.
Samira's grip tightened on my arm.
"What did you see," she asked. "Be specific."
The urge to tell her everything surged up and hit something in my chest that wasn't ready to let go yet.
"A street," I said. "Trams. Empty. No people."
"That narrows it down to most of the city after eleven p.m.," Mara said.
"This wasn't after eleven," I said. "This was… paused. Like someone hit stop on all the moving parts and forgot to unpause."
Samira watched my face, searching for signs of glitch.
"And?" she said.
I closed my eyes for a second.
Cold. Wet pavement. Grease. Stale sweetness. Metal in my teeth from the tram rails under the street. Her in all of it, like she'd threaded herself through the molecules.
"And there was…" I opened my eyes again. "Someone."
Echo's eyebrows went up.
"A someone or a something," they asked.
"Yes," I said.
Samira exhaled sharply.
"Useful," she said.
I pushed myself to my feet. My legs remembered how to stand, but only just. The platform's surface felt too smooth, too clean after asphalt.
As I straightened, a wave of dizziness hit. The floor under the glass tilted for a second into a reflection of a different street. Traffic lights. A faded orange blur. Then it snapped back to the glowing branches of Null's process tree.
I grabbed Echo's arm on instinct.
"You okay," they asked quietly.
"No," I said. "But I don't think that's new."
Mara tore their eyes away from the map and looked me over, the way you check if a plugged-in device is smoking yet.
"The daemon's log shows contact," they said. "It routed into your case node, wrote half a line, then got… redirected."
"By who," Samira asked.
Mara pointed at the air over the map.
"Good question," they said. "Not by us."
The hum in the room had changed. It was still there, but underneath it, faint, I could hear something else. A fridge in a flat I couldn't see. A TV muttering behind a wall. Little electric clicks like a traffic light changing in an empty intersection.
I tried not to shiver.
"Any system messages we need to panic about," Echo asked.
Mara flicked through overlays.
"No rollback," they said. "No purge. Just that flag. Core reconciliation suspended at your node, moved on to the others. The building shrugged and pretended you're a 'later problem.'"
"That's the nicest thing it's ever done for me," I said.
Samira let go of my arm, but stayed close. I could feel her watching the side of my face.
"This will go upstairs," she said. "Clarke, Audit, External Review. You touched something you weren't supposed to touch and came back with sentences. They don't like that."
"If they drag him straight to Archive, they'll lose the only person the daemon has marked and not eaten," Mara said. "Even they can count that high."
Echo made a face.
"Great," they said. "So now you're data and bait."
"Promotion at last," I said.
The mist near the racks had settled. The strangling brightness that had bled the shadows out of the room was gone. The daemon, whatever shape it had taken, was already elsewhere, washing its hands of us.
On the map, the descending line of the reconciliation pass had moved past the core, down into sublayers labelled with things like REDUNDANCY and LEGACY. The crisis, as far as the system was concerned, was over.
I, unfortunately, was still here.
"Can we go," I asked. "Before it changes its mind."
Samira nodded once.
"Mara," she said. "Send Clarke everything. Only what's necessary. Nothing that sounds like 'door' or 'gap.'"
Mara saluted with two fingers, already typing.
Echo hopped down from the platform and offered me a hand like we were getting off a train.
"Welcome back to the land of the partially considered," they said.
The corridor outside the chamber felt narrower on the way up. The concrete walls sweated the same damp as before, but now the smell had extra layers. Dust, old wiring, and underneath all of it, faint, almost imagined, the trace of wet stone and pastries gone stale.
I caught it in the back of my throat. For a second the stairwell folded into a different building, one with balconies and laundry and tired yellow light behind curtains.
I hit the rail with my hip harder than necessary.
Samira glanced back.
"Vertigo," she asked.
"Just remembering gravity exists," I said.
She didn't push. That scared me more than her questions.
They didn't take me back to my office.
We surfaced on a level I'd never seen before. The doors here were heavier, thicker. Fewer signs, more cameras. The corridor walls were a muted cream that wanted to be soothing and didn't quite get there.
Echo whistled under their breath.
"Wow," they said. "The nice part of the tomb."
Samira shot them a look.
"Don't be disrespectful," she said.
"Oh, I'm not disrespecting," Echo said. "I'm in awe. Look at that skirting. You can eat off that skirting."
"You shouldn't," I muttered.
"Null probably has a policy against it," they said.
Samira stopped in front of a door with no label. She palmed a panel. The lock thunked in a way that suggested it was used to being obeyed.
Inside, the room was small but well lit. One table, three chairs. A glass panel on one wall that was either a window into another room or a mirror disguising a camera. A faint smell of sanitizer that tried to erase whatever the room had been before.
Interrogation, but make it wellness.
"Sit," Samira said.
I sat.
Echo slipped into the chair beside me. Samira stayed standing for a moment, hands on the back of the chair opposite, as if arguing with herself about whether to stay.
The door opened behind her.
Clarke walked in first. Crisp suit, tie slightly loose, the perpetual air of a man whose main job was pretending he didn't hear the building whisper. Behind him came someone I didn't know.
New face. Same gravity.
They were in their forties, maybe. Dark hair cut close, a few grey strands at the temples that made them look more tired than wise. They wore a simple black shirt, no tie, no visible badge, under a grey blazer that hung on them like it had been tailored for someone who slept better.
Their eyes were the part my brain filed under pay attention. Calm, assessing, the sort of look you get from doctors and auditors and people who are paid to decide if you're safe to keep.
"Noor," Clarke said. "This is Dr. Lane. Cognitive integrity."
Of course.
Lane nodded to me, then to Echo and Samira. They took the seat across from me, folded their hands on the table, and waited for Clarke to sit at the side.
"We're not doing a formal interview," Clarke said.
Lane glanced at him.
"We're not calling it that," they said.
"So," I said. "Informal interview."
Echo gave me a tiny kick under the table. Their version of shut up but gently.
Dr. Lane's voice, when they finally spoke, was ordinary. No artificial warmth, no clinical chill.
"I need to ask you some questions about what just happened," they said. "Not to judge you. To see if your perception and the system's logs agree in any useful way."
"In other words," I said, "to find out if I broke something."
"In other words," they said, "to find out if something broke you."
Fair.
They didn't pull out a tablet or a notepad. Either they had a very good memory, or none of this was officially happening.
"Start anywhere," they said. "Preferably not with 'there was this girl' but if that's where your mind insists, try to keep the adjectives under control."
That was… uncomfortably precise.
I looked down at my hands. The skin was still my skin. No scorch marks. No glitching pixels. The tremor in them was small, just enough to make my fingers blur a little at the edges.
"I went into the noise," I said. "You saw that part on your side."
"Yes," Lane said. "Then the log shows ten seconds of deep reconciliation at your node, followed by a spike in non-classified pattern output, then a drop to baseline. From our perspective, you knelt down and stopped responding for about thirty seconds. Then you said, 'both.'"
"Both," Echo repeated. "You did say both. Which is not helpful, by the way."
"Working on it," I said.
I closed my eyes, just for a moment, and the stairwell was gone. The street came back easily, like it had only been waiting behind a thin wall.
Traffic lights changing for no one. Tram wires etched across a low sky. The girl on the wall, scarf bright against her coat. Her in my nostrils, in my ears, in the way the city held its breath.
"There was a street," I said. "It felt like my city, but… cleaned out. Not polished. Paused. No people. Trams moving without drivers. Shops without customers."
"And your sense of time," Lane asked. "Normal? Distorted?"
"Felt normal," I said. "Until you ask, and now I have no idea."
"Okay," they said. "And you were alone?"
I hesitated.
"No," I said.
Clarke shifted slightly. Samira's fingers tightened on the back of the spare chair.
Lane waited.
"There was… someone," I said. "A woman. My age, maybe. Sitting outside a bakery that was closed. Dressed like she belonged there. Like she'd been sitting on that wall since they poured the concrete."
Echo's pencil—where had they got a pencil—scratched once on the table, then stilled.
"And you spoke," Lane said.
"She did most of the talking," I said. "I mostly tried not to sound insane."
"How did she introduce herself," Lane asked.
"She didn't," I said.
"Did you ask her name," Lane said.
"At the end," I said. "She told me I should already know it. Which is going to bother me for the rest of my… whatever this is."
Lane's mouth twitched, not quite a smile.
"What did you talk about," they asked.
I thought of repeating it all, every sentence, every tilt of her head. It felt wrong. Like handing over something that wasn't mine to give.
"We didn't exchange secrets," I said slowly. "She talked about… being seen. About how madness can make you see the seams in the world. How real darkness isn't monsters, it's what's left when no one remembers your face."
Lane's eyes flickered, just once.
"Go on," they said.
"She said you remain yourself as long as someone knows who you are," I said. "When they forget, you become part of the darkness of memory. Not a demon. Just… background."
"Comforting," Clarke muttered.
"She talked about content," I went on. "About being alive in cheap ink versus being dust. About how forgetting someone might stop the pain, but it also turns them into scenery."
"And did she tell you what she wanted from you," Lane asked.
I thought of the way she'd looked at me when she said noisy. The way she'd said you will come back like it was a fact, not a hope.
"No," I said.
"Did you believe her," Lane asked.
"Yes," I said.
The word surprised me by how easily it came out.
Lane leaned back a little, studying me.
"From the building's point of view," they said, "you made direct contact with a corrective process and came back with images and philosophy instead of panic or static. That's unusual."
"From my point of view," I said, "I stepped into a drill and found a city that's more alive than the one that killed me."
There was a small silence after that. The kind where everyone in the room is choosing their next sentence very carefully.
Samira broke it.
"Can it spread," she asked quietly. "Whatever this is. To other cases. To threads."
"Well," Echo said, "that's a fun new anxiety."
Lane tapped a finger once on the table.
"We don't know," they said. "Which is why we're going to pretend we're being very calm about it while we scramble."
Clarke sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Null can't afford myths in the plumbing," he said.
"Too late," Echo murmured.
The hum of the building pressed in through the walls. Underneath it, still there if I listened, were the other sounds. Fridges. TVs. Distant buses. Little electric clicks. The city, bleeding through.
"She said I'd come back," I said, before I could stop myself.
Lane raised an eyebrow.
"To the street," they asked. "Or to her."
"Same thing," I said, without thinking.
That earned me another assessing look, filed under keep an eye on.
"Is he compromised," Clarke asked, not quite quietly enough.
"Our working definition of compromised isn't built for this," Lane said. "He hasn't started speaking in error codes or chanting daemon logs. He's oriented. He's coherent. He knows where he is. That's more than most people after a routine reconciliation."
"So he's fine," Clarke said.
Lane looked at me, then at their folded hands.
"He's not fine," they said. "But he's useful."
There it was again. Data and bait.
"I don't suppose I get a vote," I said.
"You always get a vote," Lane said. "It just doesn't count the way you think it does."
I almost laughed. It came out as a cough instead.
"What happens now," I asked.
Clarke straightened his tie, like he was putting the official version on.
"Now," he said, "we monitor. Your case is under external review. This little… excursion adds data. We'll put extra limits on where you can go and who you can see in the system. For your safety, and for ours. You keep working, you keep reporting. Dr. Lane will check in. You do not try to touch the daemon again."
"And if the daemon touches me," I asked.
Lane's gaze slid to the mirror-wall, then back.
"Try not to make it jealous," they said.
They let me go, eventually. Not back to my old borrowed office, but to a newer, smaller one higher up. The window was fake—projected cityscape that looped every thirty minutes—but someone had chosen a loop that included tram wires and flat grey sky. It felt like a bad joke from the building.
Echo stayed with me until Samira dragged them back to their own work. Lane left with Clarke, taking some of the air with them. The door shut. The hum settled.
I sat on the edge of the standard-issue cot and waited for my hands to realize they could stop shaking.
The fake window flickered. For a moment the tram wires outside overlapped perfectly with another set in my head. The orange of a passing signal light matched the orange of a scarf lifted by wind.
"Next time you come here," she had said, "you won't ask if it's real."
I stared at the projection until my eyes ached.
On the far wall, a panel blinked softly. A tiny notification. Case updates.
I crossed the room and touched it, half-expecting it to shock me.
My file opened in a stripped-down view.
CASE 7F-19N – STATUS: ADMINISTRATIVE DEATH – ACTIVE ANOMALY
THREADS: RESOLVED / REDIRECTED – 96%
RESIDUAL SCORE: 4%
New lines had been added.
DAEMON CONTACT: RECORDED
OUTCOME: UNCLASSIFIED PATTERN
RISK: UNKNOWN
RECOMMENDATION: OBSERVE
Below that, in smaller text:
EXTERNAL NOTE APPENDED – ORIGIN: REDACTED
CONTENT: "LEAVE IT. I WANT TO SEE WHERE IT GOES."
The words sat there on the screen, calm as weather.
For a long time, I just stared at them.
"Great," I said to the empty room. "Now I'm a show."
Somewhere in the walls, the building hummed. Underneath, just for a moment, I could have sworn I heard a traffic light click over.
Act Nineteenth's End - "static reality withtin sin."